Sunday, April 30 2006, 12:04 PM

Last night, while reading over some sites, I decided that I wanted to go beyond the somewhat static category scheme that my site has had for a while, and do something a bit more dynamic, like the tagging scheme that sites like del.icio.us have made popular. It was a really simple change on the backend side of things, but it should allow for me to be a little more descriptive in my categorization of posts. You'll still be able to find the different tags from the dropdown in the menu, but you'll also be able to see tags via the Tag Cloud. The Tag Cloud is a premise I borrowed from a few other tag-oriented sites that shows visually how usage of one tag compares to the other tags.

To compliment the new tagging scheme, I set up some more neat (read: pointless) interaction with del.icio.us, so that any tags that exist both here and on my del.icio.us page will display an icon denoting the shared tag. The behavior is different based on what you're looking at, so I'll leave it for you to figure out. You're all smart people.

delicious rss siteupdates

Wednesday, April 05 2006, 10:37 PM

I dediced to go ahead and include the RSS thinger I discussed in my last post. I've set it up to reload the del.icio.us RSS feed once an hour, which should be plenty often. I've mainly been tagging things that I find interesting on my daily RSS feed journey, but there are also things in there that I think everyone shoud read. Chances are decent that if I feel strongly enough about it, I'll just create a normal post as well. The new page is listed in the menu bar as Additional Reading.

In other news, I bought the new Lacuna Coil and Queensryche albums yesterday, along with the Opeth album "Deliverance." I'm really digging the Lacuna Coil album ("Karmacode"). They still have the big, encompassing sound, but they've taken things a bit more up-tempo as well. They did a cover of "Enjoy The Silence" by Depeche Mode, and it's very cool. I always loved the original's simple yet haunting melody, and LC did a good job of leaving that undisturbed while layering distorted guitars and a huge bottom end behind it. I haven't had a chance to put the new Queensryche album ("Operation: Mindcrime II") through it's paces yet, but I'll get there. I've been too busy obsessing over Karmacode and Deliverance.

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Tuesday, April 04 2006, 4:25 AM

I'm sure all the cool kids have known about this site for a long time, but I just gave del.icio.us a try this weekend, and I must say it's pretty neat. It's termed as a social bookmarking service. So far, I've just used the bookmarking part, and none of the social part. There are a few things that make it pretty handy. First, it allows you to store bookmarks in a central location. This makes it easy to keep track of handy dandy links across multiple computers, which is really handy for someone like me. Second, each bookmark is tagged with one or more categories for organization. Third, there are a few extensions for Firefox that integrate the tagging and viewing of bookmarks right into the browser, so you don't have to go to the site to view what you've saved.

Another really neat feature is the ability to export RSS feeds for all of your bookmarks or just bookmarks in individual categories. I see this as being a cool thing because I could tag articles I find interesting with a particular category, and have them show up in a section of my page for others to see. The tagging process allows one to enter a description, and those descriptions should show up in the RSS output as well. It could just be more fluff on my website (of which there is already plenty), but it could be cool at the same time.

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